8:45 am - 9:10 am Keynote: The Art of Product Renovations- A Guide for Corporate Success in an Over-saturated World

About 95 percent of new products fail. The problem: outdated thinking about product positioning. But why even take the enormous risk of creating something new when the answer already sits on your shelf? What if merely transforming an existing product, with better-executed market positioning, and revitalized emphasis on the customer's needs was all that was necessary for a successful premiere in the marketplace?

In this inspiring talk, keynote speaker and Sprint SVP Robert Hackl will share how Sprint was able to take the ordinary and make it extraordinary from the seemingly obvious. You’ll learn:

•Why "customer first" is more than lip service.

•How to think differently about positioning your product.

•And the real steps anyone can take to transform an existing product into a "new" product.

It's time to redefine customer-centric unique value propositions. It's time for a practical positioning framework that gets results.

Robert Hackl

Its one thing to do a few projects every couple of months, like mapping the customer journey or doing company wide design thinking training. It’s quite another thing to put a long lasting human centered design strategy in place that completes projects often and has a continued focus on revisiting projects that have already been done to see if they are still effective. Keeping up your momentum is the key to success when it comes to making your customer the center of your company, rather than just a buzzword.

While CX should be something that is every department’s responsibility, if there is no central body that oversees communications between the different silo-ed departments that work on cx (like an enterprise wide CX team, or a CX council or advisory board), it will be hard to achieve a holistic view of the customer and streamline brand experience and your mission might not be as effective. Join this session to hear about how to be operationalizing this concept within your institution. Panelists will discuss:

•What does your customer’s journey currently look like?

oDo you have different types of customers and thus different journeys you have to manage?

•What is the actual structure of your CX team?

oIs it centralized or decentralized?

oWhat department do you belong to? Or are you spread out across the org?

oHow many people are on the team?

oWhat do you all actually do? Are you more motivational, or operational?

•What departments across the organization have a hand in the journeys your different customers take?

oAre there other areas of your business that have ownership of traditional CX functions? Such as customer service, journey mapping, employee engagement?

•Given the structure you have, and the stakeholders that work on CX across the business, how do you best work together to improve the customer’s journey?

oHow can you show a connection between CX investments and ROI given the different goals each department that works on CX might have?

11:00 am - 11:25 am Keynote: Equipping Your Employees with Tools to Help Customers When Keynote: A Customer First Approach They Need it

The employees within your organization that come face to face with your customers play an incredibly key role in how your customer experiences your brand. Do you know the role that your frontline customers play within your stores or via phone? Do they have the right tools in their hands to help your customers when they need it? Join this session to hear more about how to be designing products for your frontline employees that make them the ultimate ingredient in your CX success batter.

There is a business case for kindness – attracting and retaining top talent, helping our customers fall in love with your company and building business by leading with love. Whether you are a manager of people or part of a team, you can both guide and begin with love, compassion and empathy for your team—and your beloved customers. When employees feel cared for and part of a work family, they are happier and more likely to stay and treat customers with warmth and compassion. I will show you how to create a work family based on loving-kindness, and watch your success and productivity skyrocket. You’ll learn how to build and amplify a culture that nurtures great work and truly cares about people – both employees and customers. You’ll also discover how to use intuition in hiring and create an ego-free environment that retains top talent and supports mindfulness practices, which increase innovation, creativity and happiness. Sounds like a no-brainer, but it is hard and you have to work at it. Learn how to make it a priority and a non-negotiable part of your culture. It can happen, and my team is a living example. I will even do a guided meditation as part of the talk. It is time to love what we do, how we do it and whom we do it with. Life is short. Work happy.

12:05 pm - 12:30 pm Keynote: Preparing for What’s Next: Can Your CX Team Help Make the Case for Enterprise Wide Innovation?

Your department is your company's biggest customer advocate. Your customer wants to be able to seamlessly engage with you through a blend of human-manned and digital channels. While you often have a hand in the human manned channels, you maybe not be as involved in the digital products your customers used. But you should be helping your counterparts in other departments fight any resistance your organization might have towards innovating digitally. There are many challenges to overcome when thinking about internal transformation initiatives, but should resistance from within your institution be one of them?

•How do you keep pace with quickly changing industry standards?

•How are you keeping up with new opportunities and technological innovations? Do you know what’s truly here to stay and what might be more of a fad? What tech will actually revolutionize the industry?

•Do you have an understanding of the regulatory environment you are in? Do you know the stakeholders that need to be swayed in order to invest in emerging technology? Do you understand their point of view and concerns?

•How can you identify ways to reduce risk while investing in new tech?

Shel Kimen

During the inaugural ‘Share Your Successes’ interactive session at NGCX, the audience will spend ten minutes in small groups. During those ten minutes, each audience member will be asked to share a recent CX success they’ve had with their group (successes big and small welcome!) After ten minutes is up, each group will be asked to pick a group representative to share whatever their particular success was in a brief minute long report back in front of the entire audience! We encourage you to think about your successes ahead of time, so you can be ready to share them with the group. We know we have a lot of talented CX professionals in the room and want you all to be able to learn from each other, not just from our speakers!

Track A: Digital Experience Management

There is huge untapped potential in the use of voice technology. Major brands are racing to figure out how it will impact their digital strategy and many have yet to understand how transformative it be for the future of mobile experiences. Are you going to be able to keep up with the voice revolution? Join this session to hear answers to questions like:

•Is voice the future of mobile?

•What role will they have in your omnichannel strategy?

oHow can you start to make sure the two are complimenting one another?

•What are some of the other use cases of voice and how do those fit in with your mobile strategy?

Track B: Employee Engagement

Every organization approaches their customer experience strategy, structure and governance a bit differently. A great first step if you don’t have an overarching cx strategic department is establishing a cx council or pulling together an advocate team. These teams champion customer experience across all departments and meet together to work on strategic projects.

•Who are the best people to bring together in a CX steering committee within your organization?

•What are the steps to establishing a meaningful group like this with real impact?

•How do you bringing these people from different departments together given their focus on other priorities?

•Making sure your organization understands the impact that a group like this can have, given the background that all individuals will be able to bring to the table

Your frontline is the backbone of your brand. They have face to face interactions with your customers every day. Their reactions to situations will shape how customers feel about you and can keep customers from abandoning you if they are having an issue with purchasing something or struggling with an item post sale. Join this panel to hear about:

•How to get these employees bought into customer experience

•What methods of motivation keep employees going, even when they might be dealing with upset customers

•How to establish a culture that motivates, not just pay them to do better

Elizabeth Robillard

What if designing award-winning solutions could be as enjoyable as designing your Dream Home or your Wedding Day? Learn how to design your customers' “Perfect Day” through a highly collaborative and simple process which doesn't require any sticky notes, PowerPoint or Spreadsheets, and instead relies on dreaming, storytelling, drawing and most importantly; empowering your customers to co-own the design.